The present invention relates to the field of customized information presentation. More specifically, one embodiment of the invention provides a custom page server which can quickly serve custom pages and is scalable to handle many users simultaneously.
Web servers for serving static documents ("Web pages") over the global Internet are known. While static documents are useful in many applications where the information to be presented to each requesting user is the same, some applications require customization to appeal to users. For example, in presenting news to users, custom pages present news which is more relevant to the requesting users than static pages. With static pages, a user will often have to scroll through many topics not of interest to that user to get to the information of interest. With custom pages, the information is filtered according to each user's interest.
Customizing a server response based on the requester is known, however known systems do not scale well. One method of serving custom pages is to execute a script, such as a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) script, or other program to collect the information necessary to generate the custom page. For example, if the custom page is a news page containing stock quotes, sports scores and weather, the script might poll a quote server to obtain the quotes of interest, poll a sports score server to obtain the scores of interest and poll a weather server to obtain the weather. With this information, the server generates the custom page and returns it to the user. This approach is useful where there are not many requesters and where the attendant delay is acceptable to users. While it may be the case that current users are willing to wait while pages load in their browsers, growing impatience with waiting will turn users away from such servers, especially as use increases.
One approach to avoiding long waits is to transfer the custom information in non-real-time, so that the information is stored local to the user as it arrives and is presented to the user on request. A disadvantage of such a system is that the networks used by the user become clogged with data continually streaming to the user and require large amounts of local storage. Another disadvantage is that the locally stored information will become out of date as the server receives new data.
From the above it is seen that an improved system for delivering custom pages is needed.